“Ay, a girl!” taunted Catherine, her voice
cracking with rising hysteria. “A girl!
. . . For eight generations the first-born has
been a son. And the ninth is a girl! The
daughter of a foreign dancing-woman! . . . God
has indeed taken your punishment into His own Hands!”

CHAPTER II

THE WIDENING GULF

The birth of a daughter came upon Hugh in the light
of an almost overwhelming shock. He was quite
silent when, in response to Catherine’s imperative
gesture, he surrendered the child into her arms once
more. As she took it from him he noticed that
those thin, angular arms of hers seemed to close round
the little swaddled body in an almost jealously possessive
clasp. But there was none of the tender possessiveness
of love about it. In some oddly repugnant way
it reminded him of the motion of a bird of prey at
last gripping triumphantly in its talons a victim
that has hitherto eluded pursuit.

He turned back dully to his contemplation of the wintry
garden, nor, in his absorption, did he hear the whimpering
cry—­almost of protest—­that issued
from the lips of his first-born as Catherine bore the
child away.

For a space it seemed as though his mind were a blank,
every thought and feeling wiped out of it by the stupendous,
nullifying fact that his wife had given birth to a
daughter. Then, with a rush as torturing as the
return of blood to benumbed limbs, emotions crowded
in upon him.

Catherine’s incessant denunciations of his “sin”
in marrying Diane Wielitzska—­poured upon
him without stint throughout this first year of his
marriage—­seemed to din in his ears anew.
Such phrases as “selling your soul,” “putting
a woman of that type in our sainted mother’s
place,” “mingling the blood of a foreign
dancing-woman with our own,” jangled against
each other in his mind.

Had he really been guilty of a sin against his conscience—­satisfied
his desires irrespective of all sense of duty?

He began to think he had, and to wonder in a disturbed
fashion if God thought so too. What was it Catherine
had said? "God has indeed taken your punishment
into His own Hands."

Hugh was only too well aware of the facts which gave
the speech its trenchant significance. He himself
had inherited owing to the death of an elder brother
in early childhood. But there was no younger brother
to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in
the direct line of succession the title and entailed
estate would of necessity go to Rupert Vallincourt,
a cousin—­a gay and debonair young rake of
much charm of manner and equal absence of virtue.
From both Catherine’s and Hugh’s point
of view he was the last man in the world fitted to
become the head of the family. Hence the eagerness
with which they had anticipated the arrival of a son
and heir.